Colorfront Cloud Services Adds EDL Conform, VFX Pull to 4K Post

On-set dailies and transcoding developer Colorfront has announced it will add EDL conform and automatic visual effects pull features to the dailies transcoding and format rendering already available through its Colorfront Cloud Service, a flexible public and private cloud service that streamlines intensive post workflows for facilities separated geographically. Colorfront CTO Bill Feightner (above) will also speak with other panelists on the topic of distributed post tomorrow, February 20, at the HPA Tech Retreat in Indian Wells, CA, near Palm Springs.

Officially launched in October last year, Colorfront Cloud Services let users securely upload footage and metadata to Colorfront's own secure server in Los Angeles, a facility's preferred server or a public cloud service like Amazon Web Services. The core of Colorfront's distributed or virtual post workflow is the company's Transkoder engine, which it uses in conjunction with Amazon Web Services' GPU-enabled servers. Colorfront Cloud has already successfully used the Amazon server to render and deliver a few hours of 4K RAW footage for broadcast in multiple formats and is working with major broadcasters in the US, UK, Europe, Japan and Brazil as they transition to super-high resolution cameras from Sony, Canon, Red and ARRI poised to capture the next-generation of Ultra HD content. The company's On-Set Dailies and Express Dailies systems, which share a lineage with the Transkoder engine, are already used in television production and won a Primetime Engineering Emmy in 2012.

Colorfront has partnered with Hollywood studios and leading post facilities to develop its technology and plans to connect the distributed post workflows of facilities already using Colofront on-set and dailies technology, including those behind the Oscar-nominated films Captain Phillips, Gravity, Nebraska,Prisoners, Rush and The Wolf of Wall Street. Last December, the company impressed attendees of the CineGrid convention by demoing realtime 4K JPEG2000 playback directly from Amazon’s S3 storage to a 4K DCI cinema projector, proving that digital cinema quality was indeed possible over the public cloud.